February 2010

I actually got an e-mail about this shirt a month ago, and I really wish I’d paid a lot more attention to it now because it’s pretty incredible really. In case you can’t quite see it, the skull is made up of the seven deadly sins written in some pretty great type. Good size print, and a wearable design too.

Yes, sensationalist, but there are more than a few grains of truth to it. Tee Lotto, which I think might be an offshoot of recent daily tee upstart (and advertiser on HYA) 5quidink are going to sell up to 33,333 t-shirts for $12 including shipping, $15 for us shifty looking foreign types, take $3 of each sale and throw it under a metaphorical mattress, and after 90 days, or sooner if they sell out, they’ll give all of those $3s to someone that bought a tee.

Or in other words… it’s a raffle. You buy your t-shirt ‘ticket’ and you might win a decent amount of cash. You can’t actually buy your shirt yet, they become available tomorrow, but I thought I’d let you know ahead of time in so you can be there at the first opportunity in case all 33,333 tees sell out, which I’m sure will happen within a day or two.

I must say that I’m not too impressed with the design that is on the site at the time of writing (maybe they’ll pop something else up when the sale starts), but with a concept like this I think that it’s less about the design and more about the idea.

It’s Saturday, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for just copy/pasting this e-mail from the people putting the book together:

TypoShirt One – Call for entries

TypoShirt One is about typography on T-shirts. It is definitely not the first publication that deals with the topic of “T-shirts”, but it’s the first one that focuses exclusively on the typography phenomenon in T-shirt culture. Only shirt motifs created explicitly with typographic means shall be presented in this publication. There are no fees, it’s totally cost free!

We would like to invite everybody to contribute to the book TypoShirt One, the typography T-shirt compendium. The book will be published at Index Books in 2010.

We invite everybody to submit their own projects for this publication, bringing together typographic designs of T-shirts from all over the world, showing quotes, sentences, words, letters and numbers or any other typographic pieces of work.

Participation or having work selected for TypoShirt One is totally cost free on your part. Also, if your work is selected, you’ll get a free copy of the book.

This right here, this is a werid promo. Johnny Cupcakes is having a meetup in LA today (Westwood is in LA right, I’m sure I remember that on the map), and if you turn up to Diddy Riese at 10pm wearing a JC tee (and really, what else would you be wearing?) he’ll give you a free ice cream sandwich. Presumably other fun things will occur.

I really like the style of this tee. Having a design that is just linework is fairly unusual, but I think that it works because of the use of a white colourway, even if it were brown (the more traditional owl colour) then it might suffer a bit, though a light grey could probably work quite nicely. Vicious History are a pretty new tee company, as you may have guessed from their name, they like to take more of a historical look at t-shirt designs and incorporate historic elements into their shirts. What does an owl have to do with history? I have no idea, but it does look kind of old time-y.

I’m in my mid-20s, so obviously I think this tee is cool, but in my role as ‘Lord of all T-Shirts’, I must say that the simple aiport-sign-esque design style works pretty nicely as well, bravo Nerdy Shirts

I had a great time when I went down to Margin a couple of years ago, obviously I didn’t make it there last year since I was in America, and it would have seemed silly for me to make a trip down this year after visiting the city in December, but fortunately the Daily Street (the UKs premiere streetwear blog, probably?) checked out the tradeshow and have a good overview of the brands there that stood out for them. Well worth a read.

I think this is a brilliant tee. I’m probably doing The Dept. a bit of a dis-service, but it just looks effortless. I’m assuming that the shape is meant to signify a spaceship, in which case it’s like they took a spaceship and kept paring it down until they had the simplest shapes that still looked like a stereotypically iconic spaceship. If that shape isn’t meant to be a spaceship, I’m gonna look like a dumbass, but that’s happened before so I’m used to it.

I think I like the concept of this tee more than the execution, the ammo portion just look a bit bleurgh to me, which is my way of saying I don’t particularly care for it and have no good way of describing it.

If I ever needed proof that I shouldn’t sit on links (and I’m sitting on hundreds), this is it, because whilst this is a mighty fine tee which deserved to be posted in its own right, I acutally wanted to post this textual beauty that Deter Clothing used to sell that I found on Rumplo; still, it led to me finding a really solid collection of tees, so at least that took the edge off the disapppointment.

Usually when I write about a shirt with this kind of design style, I feel the need to give it a caveat or say “hey, here’s your horror tee ‘o the week,” and I’ll post it because I respect the amount of work that has gone into it, but I rarely actually like the tee. However, this tee is pretty sweet, I could totally wear this, maybe I’m turning to the tee dark side? Or maybe it’s just because I like robot t-shirts

I know this hoodie has been out for a while, but The Most Fantastic Things is one of my favourite Linty Fresh designs, and lets be honest, I don’t post enough hoodies on the site nowadays. The design is also available as a tee in quite a few colourways.

I can’t help but feel that I am in the perfect positition to be the guy that runs Year Of The T-Shirt. Basically, he’s just going to wear a different shirt every day of the year, take a photo of him wearing it, and provide minimal commentary. In some respects he’s kind of like the I Wear Your Shirt guy, except he isn’t pimping the people who make the shirts at every opportunity, in fact, I think that a vast proportion of the tees are ones that he bought himself, though like most people he probably wouldn’t complain if you sent him a tee. The site is quite sparse, but in a pleasing way, which is probably why I’d ruin a project like this, because if I see a space I just have to fill it, and every so often I have to fill it with adverts, because otherwise I’d have to be doing some job I hate.

I know it’s not the best deal in the world, but laFraise make such cute infogrpahics that I just can’t help myself. The coupon code you’ll be wanting to use in this instance is FREESHIP40, and it lasts until the end of the month. Also, they do still have some tees in their winter sale for €13 and €17, which actually is a good deal, as the LaFraise tees I have are high quality, the prints stand up to washing really well.